Cheers guys! The plan is pretty straightforward, Bobby - improve. Photorealism has so many aspects - anatomy has to be spot on, texturing has to be spot on, rendering has to be spot on. There's always room for improvement. Opportunity to impress myself. It's amazing how hard that is. I'm a real nitpicky fucker when it comes to my own work.

If memory serves (and I could well be wrong), the rationale behind the anti-divorce stuff is because of the societal realities of that time, place, and culture, where by and large men would initiate divorce and the divorced women would end up destitute and homeless. It seems fucked up from our perspective but put in context, it was more a way to prevent women from getting fucked over by dudes who wanted to trade in for something newer.

couldn't he have just said "don't be assholes to divorced women" ?

Probably did. There's been a lot of editing and rewriting since he gave his fictional sermons.

I totally feel you about the weirdness of going to church. I've been thinking about JAYSUS a lot recently and it's super disorienting. Somebody pointed out a way to read jesus that makes him extremely relevant to my life, and so I'm riding it out until it gets uncomfortable. Thinking new thoughts, some of which are corrosive to older selves I've got archived. But if I start talking about Jesus randomly, my friends are going to think I've completely lost my shit so I try to keep my mouth shut, it's too alien.

By and large, Jesus had a pretty good message. It's trite I know, but the problem really is the fan-club (and especially certain very vocal segments of it).

I always read the crucifixion as a meatphor for that. Like, you take all the cool shit the dude said and you nail it to a plank of wood and watch it rot

The nation-state model collapses completely, taking with it central government and fiat currency as the primary means of economic exchange. Reputation economy takes over.

IBM brings a fully functional 128 qbit quantum processor to market. Once of the first things scientists use it for is to totally disprove quantum theory but it gets stuck half way through the calculation.

In case you haven't been paying attention, we're always fucked. There is never any hope and this time it is always different. This time it's usually foreals, as opposed to all the other times before where we were told it was foreals but it turned out not to be, this time it truly is. Just like all those other times.

Worrying about whatever brand of foreals bullshit is being paraded as the end of civilisation this month got old for me some time around my mid 20's. The last one I remember giving a passing fuck about was the nuclear holocaust that failed to materialise, with clockwork regularity, on the hour, every hour for about a decade and a half, thus ruining any shot of passing into adolescence and planning for the future I might have had.

Protip: We are not fucked. We never have been and, to the best of my knowledge, we never will be. Now I know that's not what you might want to hear but, unfortunately for you, that's how it is. And always has been, ever since the first hysterical monkey learned to rub his opposable, panic stricken thumbs together and yell "We're fucked and there is no hope" Primate was wrong then and he's still wrong seven billion years down the line.

In an existential sense, yeah, sure we're fucked. Pretty soon each and every one of us is going to start rotting and dying and, if you manage to avoid being crushed by a falling piano, the best you have to look forward to is trying to remember who your family are and how to piss and shit without it filling up your trousers. Yeah, in this sense we are all fucked. To death. There is no Jesus, Allah or the fucking tooth fairy going to stick you back together again. Couple of years from now - you die. Enjoy.

Meanwhile you got options. You can either worry about how hard you are about to be fucked (foreals this time) or you can choose to not give a shit about the impending dildo apocalypse or, even better, to laugh at all the assholes throwing their life away whining about how it's not fair and how we're all fucked. There are victims on every corner. Corners they mostly painted themselves into and refuse to leave. That shit's funny if you have the stomach to laugh. If you don't then yeah, we're all fucked.